ipod and space E4 and Editing

Thankfully, I had a ipod model I made earlier like 2 years ago when I first started modeling. Ipod will be used after the city scene. Also as the last scene, I came up an idea like futuristic, star wars kind of E4 logo at the end.

The background of the space was simply made in photoshop applying space pattern and E4 logo is the only 3d model. However it looks quiet nice and im happy with it. For the ipod scene, I didn't have enough time to model whole speaker in detail so I just modeled rough key figures and covered rest of it with texture. Also it will be seen less than 2 second so we think it was quiet clever move.



For the editing, Loanne made a purple cloudy effect on photoshop and gave it to me. I overlayed the picture on the top of the 2d sequences to give a sense of unity and consistency. I didn't put the layer on 3d sequences because it would ruin the shininess and futuristic feeling of 3d.

Plain drawing

purple cloud layer overlayed

Editing in After Effect

It was the first time I've ever actually edit the whole film since the first year. First year work was only putting all the work together and didn't do much of effect but this time I did some experiences on my own to make them look good. I found editing is really difficult for me but it definitely has worth to learn so I will play around with it and learn it more in this summer.


In terms of music, we looped our film with the tunes E4 itself provided for the competition, and picked one called Jazz2. It matched with our film strangely well, fortunately.


As working only together for the first time, we had very good communication with each other and shared almost same schedule throughout the term. It helped a lot to finish the work quiet quickly compare to the precious works. I think we succeeded to manage our time efficiently this time.

Planning for showreel

To gather previous works for my showreel, I sat down and watched over old works. To be honest, I didn't really like the pieces I worked on past years, because I just found what I really want to do in last term, which is more technical stuff like MEL scripting and dynamics rather than modeling or animating. I could just put old pieces in the showreel but I want it to show more about what I am into and what I am going to do for the future.
So I decided to put only 2 films I worked, which are Flip Flap from the first term in this year and E4 project me and loanne is working on right now. Also I will put other examples I worked on my own on particle systems and dynamics.

Below is the simple storyboard for the showreel. I can use some of the scenes from what I already made before and it will be required just bit of editing.

City and Lights

Not like other scenes, the city scene will be the only scene has both 2d and 3d sequence. So Loanne drew outline of the city first and gave it to me so that i can work on 3d effects and editing on After Effect.

While she was drawing the city, I was playing around with making neon sign in maya.
I found the tutorial on youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eucvqSzRpTA
I reckon this is really easy because i can make it only using hypershade, no other dynamics, particles and mental ray. Also it can be used as glow effect or others.
I will use this effect to the lights around the e4 building.

Below picture is the first example I played around with.

I made lights around the e4 building, but it doesn't look well enough as I though with the white backgrounded buildings. What I expected was it would look shiny and glowy in the night. However, the glowness was blended into the white background and doesn't look matched with 2d as well.

So we discussed how we can make it look good and found there is "toon" menu at rendering menu set. It gives much more tidiness and look of 3d and 2d at the same time. I squashed the spheres so that can look more 2d-ish and rendered with toon.

For the compositing the city, I broke down loanne's 2d city to 3 parts - front, middle and back sections and put them as 3d layers. To give some sense of depth of field, I added gaussian blur to back and front section.

After add the lights and clouds.

Moodboard

I was deeply inspired by this short film that I watched in FMX fextival in sttutgart. It is called "Nuit Blanche". Here are the video and making video.

When I planned the city scene for our E4 project, I reminded this clip and knew it will be the first thing to be put on my mood board.

Space, Flashing lights, Eyes, Snapshot from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.

These are the moodboard for city generally. I am quiet obsessed with eye and blurred flashing lights picture, so I added them on to it. Snapshot from 2001: A Space Odyssey gave me a sense for the room. The space pictures gave me vague idea for the last E4 logo scene but it didn't came to me clearly yet.

The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe Halsman (1948),Ascending and Descending by M.C. Escher, 3D modeled Relativity by M.C. Escher and Lego version of two pictures.

Above images are collection of optical illusion pictures. I put them because like the moving image i found and posted earlier, these pictures gives sense of deja-vu and surrealistic feeling.

Brief storyboard

Me and Loanne met up in the library after the FMX trip and quickly drew a story for the E4 project. 

The clip starts with blinking eye, which is a medium that connect the world and us.

Scene1 connects to the picture in a book in scene 2, book is a old form of media.

This scene connects to the scene 4, which is a screen of a tv. TV is an important two dimensional of a mass media because it can deliver not only live action but with sounds.

Now the camera zoom out from the room to a city, which means the city is filled with all this kind of rooms and media.

And it turns right in to a picture in an ipod screen. Since ipod video released, it evolves to one of the important way to get information, being upgraded to ipod touch, iphone and ipad.

Zooming out from the ipod, it blends into an white background and it turns to a giant E4 logo.

By all these, the clip means E4 contains all form of media and you see it.

Loanne will draw through scene 1 to 7 in 2D and I will make 3D models and special effects through scene 7 to 12. Whole duration is only 10 seconds so I reckon it is important to draw/make scenes look clear and easy to understand.

Inspiration

  At first, me and loanne were inspired by an animation called "Love & Theft" at the FMX conference. The animation starts with a dot in the middle of the screen and it develops to different shapes by a music progress and it changed to series of different facial expression at the climax and finished with a dot again. It was really simple 2D animation but it interacted with music really well and gave the feeling to the audience that they are absorbed into the animation. As we have provided tunes from E4, we wanted to try something similar to this animation.

  After the fmx, I found this deja-vu image on the internet. The image expresses deja-vu feeling visually with 8 repeating images.

I also reminded director michael gondry's smirnoff ad.

I think above three works are narrated by the stream of consciousness, and by this way, the animation / ad has something draw attention from the audience subconsciously.

Stream of consciousness, the continuous flow of sense‐perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue. The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the stream of consciousness is the subject‐matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it. In the second (literary) sense, stream of consciousness is a special style of interior monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a character's thoughts ‘directly’, without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, syntax, and logic; but the stream‐of‐consciousness technique also does one or both of these things. (Wikipedia)

 I found it's really interesting way to continue storyline by the objects which stimulates association. As a tv channel, E4 is strongly connected with media. So we came up with a concept idea of making animation with objects that can be used as a media such as books, magazine, screens, etc.